Thursday, February 17, 2011

"In a recent and wonderful New York Times essay, John Tierney documented the pervasive left-leaning bias of the social sciences in particular and academia in general, which he persuasively painted as the home of tired ideological groupthink. No doubt his essay was an eye-opener for anyone without much experience in the ivy morass, even as it came up short in its search for causation.

There is a dangerous synergy between the academy’s attitudes and what is permitted or proscribed in our scientific journals. An interesting example is in the February 4th issue of Science, the nation’s most prestigious technical magazine and the flagship of scientists’ Washington lobby, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The mixing of politics and science, particularly with respect to climate change, has been spilling onto Science’s pages for decades now, but no more blatantly than in the recent paper by Ulf Büntgen of the Swiss Federal Research Institute and 11 coauthors.

This paper is one of many reviving the grizzled ghost of climatic determinism, an idea that originated in the 19th century, which attempts to explain complex social phenomena with simple phenomena like average temperature. ...

"SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

...

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

"Anyone who goes around and says that carbon dioxide is responsible for most of the warming of the 20th century hasn't look at the basic numbers."Patrick Michaels - Ph.D. Ecological Climatology, Professor of Environmental Sciences, U. of Virginia

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”Phil Jones, Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia, to Steve McIntyre